American Studies

What could have been a routine appointment became anything but routine. We turned a vote or two (lots of votes if you count Democratic votes that became noes instead of go along to get alongs).

We put the entire Democratic Party on notice that their job is to RESIST the Assclown in Chief and everything he does if they want our support in two years. They will be primaried if they cut deals or try to straddle the fence, just as moderate Republicans were primaried by the Tea Party. We need Leaders not ass-coverers.

Mike Pence had to leave his Presidential duties (which he shares with Bannon and a couple of others while the Orange Queen signs shit and poses for photos) to cast the deciding vote. Any minute or portion of a minute of these guys’ days that we can tie up with resistance are minutes or portions of minutes they can’t devote to fucking America.

Sean Spicer had to use the word “unprecedented” to describe Democratic behavior that was de rigeur Republican behavior for nearly the last eight years. Even FOX viewers (who know what unprecedented means) knows that one is bullshit.

Betsy Devos (SCAmway heiress and bigtime Dark Money donor) was exposed as an ignorant dunderhead with an anti-public school zeal that is the opposite of her department’s mission. This is what the GOP does … puts people in charge to wreck the Department with nonsense and neglect … unless that Cabinet job is needed to pay back Putin for favors or to keep Mitch McConnell happily greasing the wheels.

Unlike for all the other official calls – the ones on Trump’s public schedule that might have to be accounted for with the media – Trump turned the recording machine off. This was no “accidental” 18-minute gap ala Watergate. Trump or his people turned the fucking thing off for the duration of the phone call between the Head of State of Russia and the Top Businessperson currently holed up in the White House.

I’m sure you’ve also heard that Trump-in-Law Jared Kushner has a business arrangement with a top Putin lieutenant, Rotem Rosen, who if he lived in New Jersey instead of Moscow might be recruited by the Sopranos. I believe it involves a $295 million investment in Trump Soho.

Everyone knows by now that Trump has not divested any of his business interests and still controls them on paper and through family members. He receives regular “business” reports that, I’ll wager, he spends more time reading than he did the intelligence reports for the tragic raid in Yemen that cost a Navy Seal his life.

You’ve heard about all of these things – and at top volume – because your Democratic Senators and Congresspeople and their aides won’t shut up about them. Right? Are calling for investigations. Right? Are looking into impeachment?

No? Well, that’s what would happen if the tables were turned. Which is probably a PRIMARY reason why the tables have turned so radically in the last election and why Republicans control the Senate, the House, the White House, and the Supreme Court now just to name a few. Meanwhile, some of the Democrats I know are busy tone-shaming each other on social media and arguing about what color to wear to the planned Science March on Washington.

We’re in a War, folks. For the future of America. Which won’t resemble anything in the past of America if we don’t get off our asses and scream bloody murder. And force every elected Democrat to do the same thing. Every waking second. Of every day.

For myself, I prefer “civil” disobedience. Organized through regular political channels. But if establishment Democrats blow it again, if they don’t RESIST, then resistance will occur but in very different ways. And it will be even harder to recognize that America.

That’s a serious question. If you’ve ever been inside a church, you know The Donald hasn’t. Except maybe for a relative’s funeral. The occasional wedding. Trump needs a Prayer Coach to teach him how to bow and hold his hands, a Worship Coach to show him where to look, a Pretend Coach to teach him how to act engaged in praising Jesus when he’s actually bored shitless and wondering how long until he’s in his limo and can start surfing porn. Can’t Ivanka or somebody show him tape of Pence and his Beard (sorry, Wife) at worship next to Poor Donald. See how devout they look?

Until 2016, Donald Pussy Grabber Trump never gave a single thought to God and he harbors not a single ounce of Faith. Before 2016, if he’d ever accidentally walked into a church – and realized people had to be quiet and that the women’s dresses mostly fell below the knee – he would have turned and run for the exit.

I saw some dotty old Aunt Bee types on CNN or somewhere (in an assisted living in Kansas or wherever) saying they could tell that Donald was reformed, now touched by the Lord. Well, somebody’s “touched” – or “tetched” as we use to say in Indiana – but it ain’t The Donald and it ain’t by the Lord.

How ironic then that Donald Trump is one of the only GOP Presidents to actually deliver on some of the promises he made to curdled rightwing alleged believers in order to get elected. Including declaring war on Muslims. Including yesterday, when he promised to “completely destroy” the limits on church spending and advocacy in regard to political campaigns. Which will turn some of the nation’s megachurches into Super PACs overnight.

Donald got your votes, Aunt Bees. Now he wants your pennies. The Christian Kissing Up Act might be part of the Bannon neofascist worldview somehow … I’m still reading up on that asshole … but it’s probably (or mostly) just a naked money grab.

Think of it as a tithe, good folks, to make sure the planet burns up sooner and that science never finds a cure for your granddaughter’s paralysis. Think of it as a tax on stupidity.

How dumb do you have to be to believe Donald Trump is a Christian? Dumb enough to think FOX is fair and balanced. Or that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States.

That is my vow. It’s a paraphrase of a tweet made by our dumb President, who was vowing to study a “dumb” deal the much smarter last American President made with the smarter and more effective PM of Australia.

You know, the Turnbull guy that President Clueless hung up on yesterday after bragging about his electoral college margin of victory and complaining about the U.S.-Aussie agreement to relocate a thousand plus Syrian refugees from the Land Down Under to the new United States Uber Alles. You know, the kind of deal that trusted allies make. The kind of deal signators to the Geneva Convention make.

It was The Donald’s staff’s fault for scheduling an hour with Australia. Trump can’t talk to anyone for an hour. He couldn’t fill an hour on the campaign trail without hecklers and someone to toss out. There is no topic (except himself) that he can talk about for an hour and, even when talking about Trump, he repeats himself endlessly. And these pesky leaders of other countries are constantly bringing up stuff he knows nothing about. No wonder he got mad and hung up.

(The staff should keep calls to foreign leaders brief, like the one today from Putin. Vladimir asked if Donald had gotten the check and Donald said yes. They traded diet pill stories and both agreed they liked adderall better. Vlad asked Don if “golden showers” were a “thing” in America and Donnie laughed. He said they were “very very” a thing. They wrapped up the convo in under five!)

The people of Australia are very very concerned about what’s happening in the U.S. On the night of Trump’s elevation (I can’t call it an election, because it was fixed six different ways), Prime Minister Turnbull addressed the nation on television, saying that the historic relationship between Australia and America might have to change. One thing he was thinking of, I’m sure, was that Australia (given the seedy, oil-greased, financial relationship with Putin) might no longer feel comfortable sharing military intelligence with an addled, Russo-compromised U.S. Commander in Chief. And that speech was given months ago, before Steve Bannon was promoted to the NSA and the Joint Chief of Staffs demoted. Can you blame Turnbull for being wary?

Can you blame any country (historical ally or not) for wondering WTF? On a daily basis, WTF? Moment to moment, WTF? The world in the last two weeks has become more dangerous than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis early in JFK’s Presidency.

This is starting to get really scary. The current inhabitant of the White House does not belong where he is. He’s too small for the suit. He knows what he knows and it isn’t much. Not much more than what the star of a reality TV show knows … ratings, reviews, how he stacks up against the competition.

He is possessed of alternate facts. Which is a short distance from saying he hears voices the rest of us can’t hear, he has delusions. However, his delusions are not the usual ones of grandeur, but their opposite. He knows he has no business being President (he is utterly unequipped for the job) and he wants to pretend that his only real job is to give “home run” speeches and bring home the ratings bacon. Something he used to know how to do.

He signs things that are put in front of him without reading them. He leaves it to lawyers to handle stuff when there are words involved he doesn’t understand such as emoluments. He is around – but barely involved – in a kind of Government by Committee involving Mike Pence, the rest of the GOP leadership, his top advisors (who tend more to his image than to policy), his daughter and her husband.

This can’t possibly end well. But it does have to end and hopefully sooner rather than later. It’s unsettling to have someone this out of touch – with this much power – nursing resentments and fostering hates.

When I read this morning that Mary Tyler Moore had died, my first thought was not of the TV series bearing her name, but of Ordinary People (1980), the extraordinary debut feature film by Robert Redford about repressed middle-class white Americans who find displays of emotion difficult and expressions of love nearly impossible. In it, Moore gives the performance of a lifetime as Beth Jarrett, a beautiful, brittle, relentlessly positive Midwestern housewife who carries a not entirely healthy torch for her dead older son and who can’t forgive her younger son for still being alive. Donald Sutherland as her kind but unassertive husband, Timothy Hutton as the surviving son Conrad, and Judd Hirsch as Conrad’s shrink are also extraordinary.

I can manage happily without ever again seeing Moore as Mary Richards throw her hat slow-motion in the air to the strains of the relentlessly positive The Mary Tyler Moore Show theme song. Not that I hated the show or thought ill of it. Quite the contrary. If I watched more TV and ranked it, it would score high. For TV, it was fairly close to life at times and a good place to start if you want a gentle introduction to 1970s America.

But it was TV – in the 1970s – and a “comedy” – so the characters are “survivors,” none of whom wind up in recovery or the mental hospital or jail, all of whom really love each other under the gruffness, whose darkest days are never that dark or last too long. And my viewing relationship with TV is an odd one. I look below the surface of the show to the writer’s well from whence it sprung, listen not to the actors’ words but to their subtext. In my distorted world, The Andy Griffith Show is about small-town loneliness. People in Mayberry are so lonely it aches. And – to my twisted mind – The Mary Tyler Moore Show was one of the saddest shows ever aired, every single one of whose characters is hanging on by their fingernails, unwilling to think too hard about anything, afraid to feel. Mary saddest of all.

And it is a small leap, really – barely a hop – from the almost real Mary Richards to the painfully real Beth Jarrett, hiding her hate and terror behind the makeup of normalcy, holding tight by her lacquered nails until they finally break – or her tortured son Conrad breaks them – and she can’t go on. Not one more step. Not in the company of her husband and surviving son, who have found their way to the real – and decided to live there – leaving Beth to run away, find others around whom she can pretend again, toss her hat in the air.

acting like a press secretary. As opposed to yesterday, when he showed up in a dark blue tie to lie for five minutes and storm off. Sean’s lies are more deft today – at his first full press conference – and his manner genial. This is bad news.

Spicer’s got skillz … and possibly stamina, he’s promised to stay as long as the reporters want … so, unlike poor Kellyanne, he doesn’t look like he’s going to dry up and blow away any day now.

My guess is that yesterday Spicer relayed a tantrum, produced by the star of Project Pennsylvania Avenue, who values ratings above all else. Today someone … probably Ivanka or poor Kellyanne … told him the reviews on the tantrum were Rotten Tomatoes and they’d have to go a different way if they wanted to stay on the air.

Too bad. A win for “normalizing.” The Goebbels act would have made it easier to get rid of the Turd in Chief. And this Sean guy is versatile … man tantrum one day, lavender tie the next … which augurs well for The Turd. And poorly for the country’s good.

lowballed the crowd estimate for the L.A. Women’s March, but there were a hell of a lot more than “a hundred thousand” people in downtown today to say “He’s not my President.” Dodger Stadium holds 53,000, guys.

I say we could have easily filled Dodger Stadium ten times over. And a network estimate, later in the day, put the Los Angeles crowd at 750,000.

This is just getting started, folks. Let’s not give that piece of shit a single day of peace.

P.S. That’s me in the photograph, standing next to the woman in the pink hat.

poised to head the Education Department, where she intends to continue to hack away at public funding for public schools until there is none of either left, it’s good to look back a year. When Mother Jones published a good article on the looming crisis inspired by DeVos’s greedy ilk and looming as one of next big crises. Well, I guess if can’t find a decent high school to attend, you can always try selling Amway. It will make you RICH!http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/01/charter-schools-mortgage-crisis-bubble

According to some, our current time should be called the Post-Truth Era, which has brought us our first Post-Truth President aided by (among other things) dozens of post-truth “news” stories, articles, statements, and tweets.

The “Last Tango actress was raped” story, which went viral these past couple days, is a good example of what Post-Truth looks like, how it behaves, and how hard it is to combat.

The 1972 film “Last Tango in Paris” was pilloried across the internet this weekend over the belief that director Bernardo Bertolucci had admitted that a rape scene between stars Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider was an actual rape. But in an interview a decade ago, Schneider herself said that no sex of any kind took place during the scene, in which then-48-year-old Brando’s character uses butter to have anal sex with the 19-year-old Schneider. In fact, she said she felt “a little bit raped” by her director and co-star because they manipulated and coerced her into doing the scene, »
– Tim Molloy

I had to search for the Tim Molloy retraction article above. Every other publication (and social media, of course) went with the click-bait version that Bertolucci and Brando raped Maria Schneider on camera in a movie you’ve seen. And Bertolucci is finally coming clean after all these years.

Except, none of that happened. There was no rape. There was no real sex, consensual or otherwise. And the Bertolucci interview was from 2013, not now. Oh, and he didn’t say what those articles said he said. He said what Tim Molloy said he said.

There is an interesting discussion in this general area. Several actually. About power relationships (and abuses of same) in Hollywood and the wider world. About what is permissible in Art to obtain (or hope to obtain) a great performance. We could bring up the recent Profiles theater scandal. And talk about Balanchine. And that horrid studio director who made child actor Jackie Cooper cry on camera by telling him his dog had died. And the butter scene in Last Tango will be a good addition to that discussion. Along with dozens of other mindfucking directorial stunts from that era and before and after. We can talk about the psychic price of emotional coercion. And the extra responsibilities one should feel toward a young person that you’re about to turn into an overnight star.Truffaut clearly felt such responsibility, Bertolucci didn’t. He didn’t care about anything but his film.

I would love to have these discussions .. and many more on similar topics … and you’ll probably find that we agree on most of them. I’m not a fan of the tactics mentioned above. Or of the behavior. In the service of Art or personal pleasure or anything else.

What we can’t have is a discussion about rape in relation to Last Tango in Paris (1972). Because no rape occurred. And no sex happened, consensual or otherwise. It was rated X for nudity and language and adult situations as portrayed by actors. Not C for Crimes.

Here, let Maria Schneider tell you. Again. She stated that not only was there no actual sex in the infamous “butter scene,” but no real sex in the movie, period. “Not at all,” Schneider said.

Who starts these things? Who sat in a room somewhere, happened to see a three-year-old interview with Bertolucci who’s nearly 80 now and hasn’t made a film in years, decided to distort his statements just enough to get attention, then watched the Internet version of the Telephone Game spin out. Who does this? And what do they get from it?

I lost friends over this, by simply stating that the story didn’t happen the way they had heard it did. They were only Facebook friends, but, hey, in times like these we need all the friends we have.

And here’s a depressing thought. If it’s this hard to cry bullshit on fake 50-year-old movie gossip, how the fuck are we ever going to correct the record on stories of national import.

How will we ever get a real President again? One who’s sort of friendly to the truth. Who’s Post-Post-Truth.You know?

A clueless alleged President Elect totally in bed with the Russian Gangster Czar, cutting deals on hotels in former Soviet states instead of attending to his transition, having his kids sit in on important government meetings, interrupting other meetings for the really important stuff (so he can talk to Indian hoteliers about still more personal business deals), merchandising your upcoming Presidency 24/7 with everything from caps to cups to chia pets for christmas before you’ve even set foot officially in your new white home (which you’ve let everyone know is a big step down from Trump Tower and you’re not happy), calling a meeting of reporters to give them crap in a vocabulary so limited it would embarrass Koko the Gorilla. Koko’s nicer, too! And more worldly wise.

No one would believe any of this in a screenplay … even for a movie with “Bad” somewhere in the title, maybe Bad President starring Billy Bob Thornton … and then you throw in the Media pretending this is business as usual? Nothing to see here?

Welcome to America Through the Looking Glass. Fuck me. Please make it stop.

That’s the title of a 1966 Cold War satire starring Alan Arkin as the commander of a Soviet sub that accidentally runs aground in new England, causing mass hysteria among the town folk. American kids back then had “duck and cover” drills just in case Russkie atom bombs were launched during Civics class, Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev could be seen pounding his shoe and saying “We will bury you” in a popular pre-cat-video meme, and the dicey (to say the least) Cuban Missile Crisis (Adios, Fidel) was a fresh memory for all.

We fought hot proxy wars with the Russia, the biggest of course being Vietnam. Southern California contractors got rich building missile system after missile system designed to protect us from the Russkies (and their little buddies, China) and stealth planes to spy on them. Devotees of spy stories are still talking about the Soviet mole who supposedly infiltrated the highest ranks of the U.S. intelligence services but was never found.

I could go on and on. But it’s fair to say that Russia is America’s most significant historical foe and – to young Republicans everywhere, especially in the Midwest and South – the most hated.

Now? Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump are besties and rightwingers in the Midwest and South cheer? They cheer some more when Russian propagandists flood the internet with false stories against the Democratic nominee, which FOX and other rightwing outlets pass along, And they seem to think it’s just peachy that Russian hackers (under the direction of their present-day KGB) plagued the Clinton campaign with dirty tricks for the better part of a year and set out to rig the general election in favor of their butt buddy Trump.

Some of this stuff qualifies – by the way – as acts of war, but they have provoked no public outrage among the rightwing populace. And not much among the GOP faithful, traditionally Russia’s greatest opponents.Yeah, we know, the country isn’t Commie anymore, it’s mostly run by gangsters. But Putin isn’t Brando in his bathrobe during his retirement years. He’s John Gotti with a nuclear arsenal, a KGB that kills people overseas when it’s not busy hacking our elections, and military operations in Syria et al.

Putin’s a piece of shit. So it’s no wonder he’s attached himself to the biggest piece of shit to ever to run for public office in the United States of America. He wants Syria to himself. He has oil to sell and horses to ride shirtless. And he’s willing to cut good deals on hotels and the like in Georgia and other former Soviet regions that he rules gangster-style now instead of with tanks. Business is business.

I get all that. I just can’t figure out why no one in America seems to be upset about it. Especially the folks in those regions of America – many of whom favored Trump – who were historically most afraid of Russia. And alarmed by all the bad things Russia might do to us.

The Russians aren’t coming, they’re here. And they’ve done a bunch of bad things, not the least of which is installing their gangster-style business mole in the highest office in the land. And still no one’s upset. ‘Cause, you know, Mexicans. Muslims. Gays.

Trump House Gang appointee and award-winning science denier, Myron Ebell, has set forth what he hopes will be his first act as new head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Ebell will ease the onerous regulations that the Obama Administration put upon the Noah’s Ark recreation in Kentucky and authorize it to sail the Seven Seas!

In the ongoing liberal campaign to squelch free enterprise and defy the will of the markets. Obama himself had personally ruled that the Noah’s Ark recreation (which contains replicas of baby dinosaurs alongside baby lions and tigers and bears) was technically a “museum” and would not be allowed to charter cruises.

After Ebell corrects this injustice, the first Noah’s Ark Caribbean Holiday Cruise will depart from Miami this coming June. Among those expected to be on board with the baby dinosaurs et al are top executives from all the major oil & gas companies, Glenn Beck, James Dobson (of Focus on the Family) and his children and grandchildren, all of Mike Pence’s surviving highschool teachers from Indiana, a to-be-named-later descendant of William Jennings Bryant (who argued for God at the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1928), and Eric Trump.

The Donald has respectfully declined to be a part of the cruise as the Noah’s Ark Caribbean jaunt will interfere with tee times he has lined up in June and a Gala “The Apprentice” Reunion Show filming June 17th at Trump Tower.

And he sure as fuck can’t sue Harry Reid, the minority leader of the Senate.

As the alleged President Elect, Vladimir Trumpy has to sit there and take it when I call him a fraudulent, ignorant, orange-haired, sexually creepy, uninformed, unskilled, unsavory Asswipe. And I happen to mention that he’s a Mobbed-up cheater, liar, and conman. Who does have a small penis. And whose father didn’t love him.

When DT realizes being President means never getting to say “I’ll sue you,” maybe he’ll take his russky nesting dolls and his Cliff’s Notes on Mein Kampf and head back to Trump Tower.

P.S. I suppose Trump could go the Nixon route and put together an “Enemies List” of people who piss him off in public and private life. But Tricky Dicky mostly used the IRS to harass his enemies and I’m not sure the IRS will cooperate with Trump. They haven’t seen a check from him in a really, really, really long time. And his lawyers never answer their calls.

And he sure as fuck can’t sue Harry Reid, the minority leader of the Senate.

As the alleged President Elect, Vladimir Trumpy has to sit there and take it when I call him a fraudulent, ignorant, orange-haired, sexually creepy, uninformed, unskilled, unsavory Asswipe. And I happen to mention that he’s a Mobbed-up cheater, liar, and conman. Who does have a small penis. And whose father didn’t really love him.

When DT realizes being President means never getting to say “I’ll sue you,” maybe he’ll take his russky nesting dolls and his Cliff’s Notes on Mein Kampf and head back to Trump Tower.

P.S. I suppose Trump could go the Nixon route and put together an “Enemies List” of people who piss him off in public and private life. But Tricky Dicky mostly used the IRS to harass his enemies and I’m not sure the IRS will cooperate. They haven’t seen a check from Donald in a really, really, really long time. And his lawyers don’t answer their calls.

I can’t write directly about what has just happened to us. It’s too big. And by “us,” I don’t only mean Americans. I mean the world.

(Just to name one consequence, the 2016 election ensures nothing will be done about climate change for four more years. Get back to me about building walls when entire nations become uninhabitable.)

But I watched most of Hillary Clinton’s concession speech this morning and I was struck again by the virtually impossible task of being a female American and running for higher office.

Even now. In 2016.

No one commented on Clinton’s hair or what she was wearing, but even I found myself wondering if she’d cry and what people would say if she did. What they will continue to say because she didn’t.

A man giving a Presidential concession speech – in 2016 – would be allowed to shed tears, be expected to when he gets to the part where he thanks his staff and family. He would be applauded for “bravery” in showing his emotions. No one would speculate on whether or not he had a vagina and fallopian tubes. And whether they disqualified him from leadership positions.

Further, men in public life are expected to “get things done,” which means cutting deals, trading tit for tat, compromising, holding your nose and making sure the check clears. Men are applauded for this behavior and even the good Christians in their midst concede Rome to the Romans as long as they are male.

If a woman does any of the things listed above, she commits two sins. The first is the sin of “corruption,” which is what “business as usual” becomes when it’s done by a high-profile female in American politics. The second – far weightier – sin is that of ambition. Also know as “pride” in the red states. Clinton made it clear that she considered baking cookies a secondary occupation at best, especially for a woman with any other discernible skills, and segments of Middle America never forgot and never forgave.

Which brings us to Tracy Flick in the 1999 movie Election. Tracy was ambitious to the point of ruthlessness, manipulative beyond the point of effectiveness, corrupt for realz, sexually suspect, and – worst of all – prideful. She had no time for cookies, but did make a mean muffin as long as it was big enough to contain her name in frosting letters.

Hillary Clinton was not guilty as charged of anything that I’m aware of. Not Whitewater, not Bengazi, not the stupid emails. Few people in American life have been so vigorously scrutinized and come up so clean. But the charges never stopped. As Clinton asserted early on, she was the victim of “a vast rightwing conspiracy” to smear her and remove her and the other Clinton from American public life.

In this latest election, the rightwing conspirators were joined by the more witless fringe of Berniebots, who accused Hillary (on non-news internet sites) of everything from being the brains behind the Trilateral Commission to sleeping with Sasquatch. It was irresponsible and dumb; it had an affect on the election. And, truth be told, a lot of the energy coming from that camp felt like garden-variety sexism. Which can comfortably stay sexist if your man is Trump but has to seek some other justification (however specious) if your man is Bernie Sanders, who made his own manly deals to be a Senator.

(Can you say no gun control, woodsy Vermonters? I can.)

Clinton found herself surrounded in 2016 by a lot of men (on her right and her left) who just weren’t comfortable with the fact she was a she. And had no way of thinking about her, judging her, characterizing her, except as some pants-suited grownup version of Tracy Flick. They demonized a good candidate – a good person, a good woman – and the world will now suffer mightily as a result.

Hillary Clinton bears no resemblance to Tracy Flick. They have no character traits in common. Except maybe pride. If pride is what we call it when a woman has the temerity to suggest she can do this job or that as well as a man can.

With all that said, in a race between Tracy and Donald Trump, I’d Pick Flick. At least Tracy possesses basic competence and only hates people who get in the way of what she wants.

Words. Just words. On this saddest of post-election days. “Ah, Bartleby. Ah, Humanity.”